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Barbera
Campbell-Allen |
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Barbara Campbell-Allen
b.1953, Griffith, New South Wales
Barbara Campbell-Allen is a ceramic artist with many years experience
in the delicate process of long wood fired ceramics. She trained at the
National
Art School in Sydney, and later at the Gippsland Centre for Design and
Art. Campbell-Allen holds a Masters of Arts (Visual Arts). Her work for
this degree began an exploration into a contemporary interpretation of
the extraordinary, naturally generated glaze effects only found in traditional
wood firing techniques. Campbell-Allen utilises paper-clay, a blend of
paper fibre and clay, which enables the making of light highly sculpted
work. She combines this material with wood firing to produce work with
unique form, texture and depth of surface. This work is often closely
related to natural landforms as aesthetic environments, which form a
source of
stimulation and inspiration.
Campbell-Allen’s work has been seen in both solo and group exhibitions, and is published in the leading ceramics journals of Australia and America. She combines a successful art practice with teaching at the Workshop Arts Centre in Sydney and the curating of ceramic exhibitions.
Clay as a medium is plastic and due to its plasticity has the ability to be highly expressive. Beyond Earth began as a reaction to the trend of current purist ceramics, which has emerged from 20th century modernism. The static, sterile nature of this work often disengages the viewer, because there is no evidence of the making process or sense of the work being hand made.
Beyond Earth is an expansion of the theme addressed in Out of Earth - exploring the plastic possibilities of clay.1 The scope of this exhibition has been developed to not only explore but to seek the limits of using clay. At the Out of Earth symposium this question was posed: “What relevance has clay and the techniques for working with clay have to offer in a time of extraordinary innovation in materials and technologies?” A response to this question and theme is found in Margaret Farmer’s review of the exhibition.
“Barbara Campbell-Allen curated Out of Earth as a response and
counterpoint to sleek-surfaced, monochromatic, geometrically exact ceramic
forms. The result is a compelling, sensual and affective investigation
of those things that may result from clay’s plasticity, that is,
from clay’s pliability and impressionability, its capacity to be
moulded, to receive and hold form...Out of Earth reveals that the possibilities
offered by clay’s plasticity are the directness of its response
and its ability to record its experience of its shaper.2 Next
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